'No one," wrote Bart Simpson on the blackboard once, "wants to hear from my armpits." "Cursive writing," he wrote in another episode, "does not mean what I think it does." But perhaps the most socially relevant line that the eternally 10-year-old yellow bad boy had to write was: "Does any kid do this any more?"

Perhaps not, but in Yorkshire they're trying something new. Grownups who park illegally outside the school gates are being offered the choice of paying a £30 fine or writing lines. Many are choosing the latter. "I will not park in a position that causes danger to the children of the school," they have to write. If they write anything else - such as "I can't believe these morons are letting me off a fine with this" or "I'll park in the same place tomorrow, losers" - offenders will have a second choice of either having their hands guillotined by art teachers or following a humiliating fitness programme devised by socially backward gym masters with personal hygiene issues. I made that last bit up, of course, but I'm quite prepared to write a paper for Demos on why such a brutal reform is not only socially necessary from the point of view of reducing crime and obesity, but also potentially fun.

Is writing lines as a punishment a good idea? I'm sceptical. I've never written lines in my life. At school I was more a swotty Martin Prince kind of student rather than a Bart Simpson. The only punishment I can remember experiencing was when a student teacher insisted I roll in mud for inadvertently kicking the ball in his face. This had, as all punishments do, unintended consequence: since then I've despised both rugby and student teachers.

Like my mud-rolling incident, like Asbos and the panoply of alternative punishments so popular in Britain in the noughties, writing lines is about shaming people into changing their behaviour. "Punish, yes," reformed perjurer Jonathan Aitken told the Observer earlier this week. "But punish thoughtfully, punish constructively," he added. He may not have been talking about writing lines, but it is at least an imaginative attempt to tackle a problem.

There are a great many people in Britain today, not all of them sadists, who are devising ever more bizarre ways of punishing miscreants. How, the authorities in east Yorkshire have been asking themselves, can we shame motorists into parking where they're supposed to? Similarly how, Jack Straw asked himself once, can we coax offenders into not reoffending? His idea, unveiled last year, was "vests of shame", whereby offenders are required to wear orange tabards with "community payback" emblazoned on the back as they do manual labour. Whether it does anything more than humiliate them remains to to be seen.

Compared with wearing these vests of shame (AKA "Guantánamo bibs"), writing lines is surely a doozy. You write the lines for a few minutes, save £30 and carry on with your unspeakably selfish life. The following day you park your 4x4 on the school crossing while Jocasta finishes her grade three bassoon exam, and you wind your window down to complaining toddlers/parents/teachers only to blow cigar smoke in their insufferably smug, prying self-righteous faces. For example.

The early news from east Yorkshire, counter-intuitively, is that the lines punishment has improved behaviour for the good. One grandparent who has been subject to this cruel and unusual punishment reportedly said: "I think it's a great idea. I don't want to pay a fine and I won't do it again." But with all due respect to one anonymous grandparent, I find this hard to believe. Britons, out of a singular combination of laziness and bloody mindedness, rarely change. Kant wrote of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. He wasn't talking about British drivers on school runs, but he might as well have been.

There is another issue. What amazes me is that no one, not even Liberty boss Shami Chakrabarti, has complained yet about how painful, humiliating and contrary to modern notions of human rights writing lines is, especially for us computer-age weaklings for whom even holding a pen, still less writing with it, is a strangely exotic, borderline S&M experience. And have Yorkshire's local authorities thought about the looming outbreak of repetitive strain injury? Have they appreciated how much paper is going to be used to make this alternative punishment scheme work? More importantly, does writing lines ever work? Has any child in history ever stopped picking their nose in class because they wrote "I will not pick my nose in class" 100 times?

One historically popular idea is that the punishment should fit the crime. Women have been put in scold's bridles by misogynists, gay men have been sodomised with red-hot pokers, thieves have had their hands chopped off and so on. If this was applied in east Yorkshire now, it would mean that if you park in such a way as to endanger children's safety, your children's safety should be endangered, possibly by dangling them from fourth-storey windows or shoving them towards lit Bunsen burners. That, surely, would stop the whole parking problem very quickly.

What, then, is the answer to the problem of illegal parking outside our schools? I don't know, but I'm sceptical about what they're trying in east Yorkshire. After all, I've never believed something else the recidivist Bart Simpson wrote on Mrs Krabappel's board: "This punishment is not boring and pointless."